Digital frames & photo-scanning services?

[Nords]

My parents-in-law are celebrating their 50th anniversary next year and we were planning on taking the entire extended family on a cruise. Unfortunately BIL had a Norwalk virus encounter and has sworn never to cruise again.

Family relations are strained but my spouse is trying to do the dutiful-daughter thing for her own conscience, so we're looking for a Plan B. And if it works well then I'll also plagiarize it for my father's 75th birthday in 2009.

We've noticed that digital frames have come a long way in the last couple years. Our idea was to pull out all our photo albums (filled with prints developed from real film, not digital) and collect 500-1000 of our family shots over the last two-three decades. We'd digitize them and provide the PILs with a digital frame to display the images as well as a few DVDs of the rest. I'm also looking for a service to digitize five hours of VHS video of our daughter's life over the last 14-some years.

Yes, I understand that I could do the job myself and that there are several great ways to do so. I want to spend my time on other projects, though, and we'd prefer to spend the money on having someone else do the scanning.

I was mildly concerned about turning our photos over to perfect strangers, but we also have the film negatives and the video has a backup copy so that will all probably work out OK. We're not trying to be cheap but we're not sure which route is better.

Should we go with a local scanning service, presumably with people who know what they're doing and whom we can ride herd on? Or is it better to use one of the national firms that advertises all over the Web? Anyone have advice on the digital frame and the scanning process, or recommendations for a specific service? Is there anything you'd avoid or do differently?

 

[TromboneAl]

Though not exactly what you are looking for, here are some thoughts.

1. I can't picture a digital frame with 500-1000 photos in it (or fed to it) as working very well. I can picture the in-laws frustratedly trying to find that picture that they saw last night.

2. You'd be breaking the rule that says "Never buy anything for your parents that was manufactured after 1964."

3. Recently I saw a friend receive a super-high-quality book that was made by an online company. You send them some photos, and they put together the book. But the quality of this thing was outstanding. The friend's sister had provided about 20 photographs from my friend's life, and the book had one on each page with amazing layouts. Like an art book or coffee table book. Friend was reduced to tears. I will find out the name of the web site -- it may have been MyPublisher | Design your own Photo Book to be printed as a beautiful hardcover book!. I think I will do this at some point.

 

[Brat]

Trombone, if it isn't the link you provided will you let me know. I think this is a great idea. At some point we need to deal with photos.

 

[Achiever51]

Though not exactly what you are looking for, here are some thoughts.... Recently I saw a friend receive a super-high-quality book that was made by an online company. You send them some photos, and they put together the book. But the quality of this thing was outstanding. The friend's sister had provided about 20 photographs from my friend's life, and the book had one on each page with amazing layouts. Like an art book or coffee table book. Friend was reduced to tears. I will find out the name of the web site -- it may have been MyPublisher | Design your own Photo Book to be printed as a beautiful hardcover book!. I think I will do this at some point.

I recently took my 89 year old, WWII vet Dad on a Dad/Daughter Roadtrip to Washington so he could finally see the WW II Memorial. To say it was moving is the understatement of a lifetime, but that's another story. I took tons of pictures and then used MyPublisher -- I found it through the Costco Photo Center -- to create a book like the one described by TA above. It turned out absolutely beautiful, bound in leather, the words I wrote even read better once they were printed and bound -- and I have no doubt that it is the very best gift I could have EVER given my Dad. He (and I) were both in tears as well...and I've learned that he's shown the book to just about everyone he knows! The cost was about $65 and I see that the MyPublisher.com site is offering up to 45% off through August. Here's the link thru the Costco site: MyPublisher

Bottom line: I think the digital frame/DVD idea is a great one, but if the Parents/PILs are in any way "book people"...this is THE gift to get!

 

[ERD50]

The physical books are a good idea, but I would not reject the idea of the digital frame on the grounds of being too 'techy' for them.

I think that many of them allow you to plug in a thumb (flash) drive, and it will display those pics. You could buy a half-dozen cheap/small thumb drives, and put different groups of pics on each one and label them. It's is a simple matter to unplug/plug a different thumb drive in. Easier than those little SD cards .

-ERD50

 

[TromboneAl]

I confirmed that it was mypublisher.com that did the book for my friend. I think I'll do one of these for my mom. I noticed that they have a coupon that gives you a free additional copy for your book.

 

[Moemg]

I was at a birthday party this year where the children gave their Mom a DVD made from old photos with music in the background . It cost in the $350 range but I think my Mom would like the book idea better.

 

[calmloki]

Concur on the theory of the Cosco book. My honey is an absolute over-achiever and spent weeks with her Nikon Coolpix and a lens attachment digitizing in excess of 7000 slides and photos taken throughout her folk's life. A worthy cause, as she then sent CDs to all the various interested kin. But for her 92 year old Mother it's been less than spectacular. Bets does sit and watch the slideshow on her computer sometimes, and the gal does have it broken up into eras and subjects, but if da'Momma wants to see just a certain shot it's a long, long wait and soon gone. Most popular is the section with pictures relating to Momma's youth. That slideshow she watches over and over.

 

[Nords]

A spammer jumped into this thread earlier today, so I might as well take the opportunity for one of TromboneAl's updates.

For her parent's 50th anniversary, spouse & kid scanned in 116 of our kid's baby-->teen photos, 10-15 a day. That was more than enough for everybody. We bought a digital frame at Best Buy that runs on battery power. The advantage of the 30 minutes of battery is that the PILs can take it to a party and whip it out for quality grandkid gloating. Every few months we e-mail an update batch to spouse's brother, who puts them on a USB flash drive and uploads them to the digital frame. (As Al points out, no way would my FIL tackle that task.) It's been a great way to keep them posted.

There's a million different flavors of digital frames today, and "try before you buy" is the best advice. Unfortunately "Best" Buy staff were a bunch of butts about letting us do so, but we prevailed. Costco is much better for the research. Or maybe it was my ponytail & three-day beard.

Now that spouse has retired from the Navy Reserve, one of her "20 minutes a day" projects is to finish digitizing our photo albums. I'm not going to get in the way of that! If she ever gets tired of it we'll use a local digitizing service. I found several on Oahu, one of them just a few minutes away.

Technology has also taken care of our VHS issues. One of these days I'll run the baby tape through a VCR one final time, record the output on our TiVo or a DVD recorder, and transfer it to our hard drive. The key is backing up everything.

Speaking of technology & backups: For our Christmas present, our iPod-savvy teen moved all her iTunes tracks from our PC to her Mac Mini so that she could "have her own stuff". Then she scoured our PC's hard drive for all the Mom & Dad classic-rock tunes that have piled up on it (from the days of Napster, Kazaa, & Limewire) and put them all together in our own iTunes account. Over the years we've been sharing our favorite artists with her in a series of "School of Classic Rock" e-mails, so she tracked down a bunch of obscure/free tunes from those bands* and put together a library of over 3000 tracks. The next step is duplicating our LPs into the library, which may be more easily done by downloading them from the web.

*She still can't believe that KISS did the best-selling ballad "Beth"...

 

[OAG]

Kind of a bit of a Hijack but, I have one of those picture frames and you can send pictures from your computer to it. Each frame of the thing is assigned an address that you send the picture to. I have not purchased the software for it but it seems to be a nice concept. Seems much simpler to just put the pictures on a Thumb Drive and load them from that.

 

[TromboneAl]

Thanks for the update. Has DW come across any shortcuts or techniques for making the mass scanning faster?

 

[Bestwifeever]

Can we just use "Nords' DW's Scanning and Photo-Digitizing Services"?

 

[Nords]

Thanks for the update. Has DW come across any shortcuts or techniques for making the mass scanning faster?

Can we just use "Nords' DW's Scanning and Photo-Digitizing Services"?

[-]Teen slave labor.[/-] Nope. She does few enough per day to make it a novelty, and at this point in my marriage career I'm smart enough to know that my "helpful suggestions" may get me placed in charge of the project-- I'm keeping my mouth shut.

 

[TromboneAl]

The one thing I did when doing a bunch of photos, and perhaps this is obvious, was to put as many photos on the scanner window as would fit, scan them in, and then copy and paste to individual image files.

Maybe if you tell her that that "helpful suggestion" came from Al, you won't be put in charge (in the same way that you are in charge of dishwasher loading).

 

[Nords]

The one thing I did when doing a bunch of photos, and perhaps this is obvious, was to put as many photos on the scanner window as would fit, scan them in, and then copy and paste to individual image files.
Maybe if you tell her that that "helpful suggestion" came from Al, you won't be put in charge (in the same way that you are in charge of dishwasher loading).

Great idea, thanks!

Even better, I'll pass it on to our kid with credit to you. She hasn't learned yet how to keep her mouth shut...